Breaking History Quotes

“Palestinians are a force within the hallways of the United Nations, so when the General Assembly voted on the resolution, I considered the forty four countries that either abstained or voted against it to be a positive indicator that we were forging strategic partnerships, using our leverage, and slowly shifting the paradigm in the Middle East.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“To my surprise, our conversation shifted to the relationship between Israel and the Arab world more broadly. We had an eye-opening discussion about the history of the region and how the conflict had reached its current state, which was far more nuanced and fair-minded than I had expected. We exchanged ideas about how we could improve the relationship between Israel and the Arab world. In the seventy years since Israel declared independence, only Egypt and Jordan had made peace and established diplomatic relations with it, in a move known in diplomatic circles as “normalization.” The remainder of the Arab League, and many other Muslim countries around the globe, had refused to recognize Israel as a sovereign nation. This meant that these countries had no diplomatic relations with Israel, including no official travel, communication, business, or commerce with the Jewish state. At one point, MBS and MBZ acknowledged that the allies of their countries were the allies of Israel, and that the enemies of their countries were the enemies of Israel. When I asked them point-blank if they would be open to normalizing, they expressed a desire to make progress on the Palestinian issue, but did not express animosity toward Israel. I sought their advice on how to approach the problem, given Abbas’s intractability. They implied that if I could get Israel to agree to a credible plan that included a Palestinian state, access to al-Aqsa Mosque, and investments to improve the lives of the Palestinian people, that could change the dynamics. They indicated that if the Palestinians rejected the plan, they would be even more open-minded.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“After exchanging niceties, I started the meeting right where Abbas and Trump had left off during their May visit, and asked Abbas whether he had made progress on the details of an initial proposal. He said they were willing to take steps that they hadn’t made with anyone else—they would be incredibly flexible on the land. But they needed to know exactly what percentage of the disputed territory they would get, and they wanted us to get Israel to propose a detailed map. If we could get them a map, they would be flexible, and everything else would be easy, Abbas pledged. I asked him if they had an initial offer on the land issue, but as I tried to drill down, Abbas wasn’t willing to talk specifics. He delivered the same set of diplomatic platitudes he’d conveyed to Trump several weeks earlier. Our conversation circled back around to my request for him to share concrete details about a land proposal he could accept. Again, he refused. I started to see why people were so skeptical of our efforts: Abbas was a savvy diplomat who was unfailingly polite and expressed a desire to make progress, but he appeared unwilling to let our negotiation reach a starting point. He said repeatedly that he had a lot of new ideas and would be flexible, but he then just rehashed the same general demands the Palestinians had requested for decades. “I’m going to go back to the president, who’s not a very patient person,” I said. “He’s going to ask me where we are on the deal, and I’m going to tell him that the Israelis are engaged and constructive, but you guys came back and weren’t willing to be flexible at all. Is that the message you want me to relay?” Abbas insisted that he wanted to be flexible, but then it was more of the same. I wasn’t sure whether he didn’t know how to make a deal, or if he just didn’t want to. Sensing my exasperation, Abbas made what I perceived to be a factitious offer: he seemed to imply that if I didn’t like the way things were going, then he would simply give back the keys to the West Bank and let the US run things. “Sure, I’ll take the keys,” I retorted. I sensed Greenblatt shifting uncomfortably in his chair, like he was trying to tell me, telepathically, You can’t say that.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“As we drove from Jerusalem to Ramallah, Greenblatt reminded me, “Don’t say that we’re for a ‘two-state solution,’ because it means different things to different people.” It was good advice, and I decided to avoid the term until we had defined what it meant to be a state. When we arrived, we were ushered through a maze of stairways into a small room that had regal chairs arranged for a diplomatic meeting. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas entered, proceeded to the front of the room, and shook our hands. He was staffed by his top negotiators: Major General Majed Faraj, a trustworthy and insightful member of Abbas’s inner circle and head of the Palestinian Security Forces; and Saeb Erekat, a loquacious and always aggrieved diplomat who had been the lead negotiator for twenty-five years but had little to show for his efforts. As they served us tea, I glanced in the direction of the Palestinian leader. Abbas sat hunched over in his seat, looking every bit of his eighty-plus years. He smoked constantly, so every few minutes he would pull a cigarette from the table, put it in his mouth, and wait for an attendant to light it. I thought that Abbas seemed more like a king than the representative of an historically downtrodden refugee population.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“No one had ever come close to a real solution that could be signed and implemented. Those who had gone before had made sincere efforts, but they were more focused on managing the political reaction to their negotiations than they were on producing detailed proposals that would have a practical impact. I decided to test a new approach: I wouldn’t try to dodge the details. Instead, I would embrace them. I asked my team to make a comprehensive “issues list” that explained the major points of contention between the two sides. This would help me understand the granular differences between the two parties. I would then work through this issues list with leaders in the Middle East to hear their perspectives and find concrete resolutions. This was how we approached transactions in business, and it made sense to apply the same technique here.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“Shortly after Trump assigned me the Middle East peace file, I asked Kissinger how he would approach the job. He recommended that rather than trying to achieve a grand deal, I should focus on creating progress through short-term agreements. In 1974, as Israeli and Arab forces fought for control of the Golan Heights, he had negotiated a cease-fire.15 The text of the deal made it explicitly clear that the agreement was “not a peace agreement.”16 Even so, Kissinger explained, it had become a new status quo over the last five decades. Permanent peace deals make for challenging domestic politics in the Middle East, he said, but if you can get rivals to agree to a short-term pact, or even a change of the status quo, it will last. Kissinger also warned me to resist efforts to run foreign policy out of the State Department. “You always have to run the foreign policy in the White House,” he said. “If the White House loses foreign policy to the State Department, you will never get anything done.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“My second piece of advice was to get rid of Steve Bannon. “He has lost his mind, wants everything to be a conflict, and he’s leaking to the press all day.” Kelly assured me that he had already taken steps to take care of that. On August 18 the president fired Bannon. Stephen Miller joked to Hope and me, “I have a plan to split up Steve Bannon’s extensive workload. Hope, you leak to Jonathan Swan at Axios. Jared, you call Mike Bender from the Wall Street Journal. I’ll call Jeremy Peters from the New York Times, and . . . we’re done.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“Around the same time, the media ran a series of stories on Ivanka, claiming that because her business had previously applied for trademarks in China, she was profiting from her government position. In reality, following the 2016 election, numerous companies in China had filed hundreds of trademark applications to exploit Ivanka’s name and brand on products completely unrelated to her. On March 8, the headline of a Washington Post article read, “From Diet Pills to Underwear: Chinese Firms Scramble to Grab Ivanka Trump Trademark.” The article went on to say that “an astounding 258 trademark applications were lodged under variations of Ivanka, Ivanka Trump and similar-sounding Chinese characters between Nov. 10 and the end of last year.” Ivanka had a successful business and owned hundreds of trademarks globally before her father ran for public office, and in May and June of 2016, after Trump entered the race, she submitted a number of additional trademark applications in an effort to protect her name in countries where trademark theft was rampant. Ivanka’s applications had been caught up in the Chinese bureaucracy for a full year. When several of the requests were approved around the time of Xi’s visit, the media tried to make it sound nefarious, but Ivanka had no control over the timing and was merely doing her best to prevent Chinese companies from counterfeiting her brand and deceiving customers.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“Part of what ultimately made Trump successful in his foreign policy objectives was that leaders found him unpredictable. He built warm rapport with his counterparts and approached each situation with an open mind. He was willing to change course at any minute and take calculated risks. His opponents never could tell whether he was bluffing or making a serious threat.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“During dinner that night with President Xi, the national security team let the president know that the strike was going very well. Fifty-eight of fifty-nine missiles “severely degraded or destroyed their target,” and no Russian soldiers had been harmed. It was still nighttime in Syria, and we didn’t expect to have conclusive satellite images for another few hours. When an aide whispered an update into Trump’s ear, he immediately told Xi the news. Xi couldn’t hide his shock. He was clearly impressed that Trump was so relaxed in such a consequential moment, and I got the sense that he didn’t know what to make of Trump. The Chinese had never dealt with anyone like him before. No one had.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“When we met with Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi, he asked to see me one-on-one. The prime minister took seriously Trump’s public statements that he wanted countries to pay a larger share of the defense cost. Al-Abadi said that he was willing to pay something for US protection, but essentially hoped for the “cheapest deal.” We probably could have gotten 20 percent of Iraq’s oil revenues in exchange for our military support, but Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis thought Trump was crazy for suggesting such a proposition and stalled the discussion indefinitely. In another instance, Mattis and his leadership team came to talk to the president about their budget and claimed that $603 billion—the largest request since 2012—wasn’t enough to keep the country safe. They needed $609 billion to achieve “military readiness.” “So with one percent more, you are military ready, but with one percent less you’re not?” Trump queried skeptically. After the brass had filed out, Trump pulled me aside and remarked, “These guys may be the best at killing people, but they sure don’t understand money.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“It quickly became obvious that the White House was very different from my experience in the private sector. Bureaucracy, egos, and people’s obsession with holding on to power stifled collaboration and progress on policy goals. In one instance Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president appointed to lead the National Economic Council, pulled me aside. “Bannon is leaking on me nonstop,” he said. “I’m not going to take this. I know how to fight dirty.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“was far from the only person Bannon turned against. During the transition, Bannon expressed frustration that Kellyanne Conway inserted herself in discussions and leaked to the press to constantly overstate her role. Bannon bet that he could engineer her exit in the first three months. He was convinced that she wouldn’t pass a White House drug test, and he didn’t hide his disappointment when she did.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“To get the transition on track, I quietly reached out to Chris Liddell, a former chief financial officer for both Microsoft and General Motors who had been executive director of the Romney Readiness Project. Liddell volunteered to help immediately. He arrived less than twenty-four hours later, the day before Thanksgiving, and worked through the holiday. Liddell became a trusted friend and confidant and was one of the few people who served in the White House for all four years of the presidency.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“Second, I learned that our political differences are not always as insurmountable as we think. Ordinarily, the Washington game revolves around the party out of power trying to stop the party in power from accomplishing its priorities. While initially I found this frustrating, I learned to keep moving ahead and to focus on the long game. Almost all of the greatest accomplishments of the administration involved former adversaries coming together to make the lives of normal people better. Rather than starting from two different sides of the table on any given issue—from criminal justice reform to peace deals in the Middle East—I tried to bring everyone to the same side of the table to agree on shared goals and search for win-win solutions. I wasn’t always successful, but it is the responsibility of those in power to try. We can’t solve problems by talking only to those who agree with us. For anyone who’s looking to advance bipartisanship, I hope this book provides insight into how it’s possible—and why it often fails.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“remember one meeting that typified the resistance Trump faced in Washington from both Republicans and Democrats. A veteran of the George W. Bush administration came to see me to discuss US-China trade policy. While he fully agreed with our aims on China, he thought that using tariffs was a grave mistake. When I asked him what he would recommend instead, he suggested more rounds of talks. I said the first thing that came to mind: “So you want us to accomplish something you couldn’t by doing it the same way you did it?” For the Washington establishment, the answer to that question was a resounding yes. Many Beltway insiders are experts at pointing out problems, but they’re even better at shutting down solutions. When confronted with the potential risks of change, they play it safe for fear that any disruption to the current system will jeopardize their political careers. This explains why even some of Trump’s own cabinet members clashed with him and those of us who believed that it was time to take calibrated risks and deliver more opportunities for the American people. Instead of spending endless energy diagnosing the problem, I focused on clearly defining the optimal solution and then worked backwards to reach the best possible outcome.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“Many authors—including former senior administration officials—have tried to explain Trump through a conventional lens. Most of these accounts fail to convey how Trump thinks, why he acts the way he does, and what really happened in the Oval Office. The truth was often hiding in plain sight. Through his untraditional style, Trump delivered results that were previously unimaginable: five major trade deals, tax cuts for working families, massive deregulation, the lowest unemployment in fifty years, criminal justice reform, a COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year, confronting China, defeating ISIS, no new wars, and peace deals in the Middle East.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“I saw firsthand the wisdom in President Harry Truman’s adage: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“Rule number one of negotiation is to always let the other side go first. “By all means,” I said.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

“Just remember,” Lighthizer said, “no one gets smarter by talking.”
― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir

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― Jared Kushner, Breaking History: A White House Memoir